I have long said that the conquering Israelis should have expelled every last Arab from the territories they conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967. It would have been a horrible humanitarian disaster, but such would have left the Jewish State with shortened, more defensible borders, and the displaced Arabs would not have been living under Israeli occupation. If Israel was not willing to expel the Arabs, then they should have just annexed what they wanted — primarily all of Jerusalem, the eastern part of which was under Jordanian control prior to the war — and left the Arabs to live in their own state in 1967.
The Israelis somehow thought that the Arabs would slowly emigrate, rather than live under occupation, but in that, they forgot Jewish history, how very few Jews fled Europe even faced with pogroms, discrimination, murders, and even the Third Reich. We’ve all heard about the Jewish refugee ship, the MS St Louis, turned away from ports in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, but out of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany, the ship carried only 937 passengers. Most European Jews thought that they could ride out the storm of Naziism, with some casualties, but mostly their communities and their people would survive intact. It was simply outside their paradigm that the Nazis really did intend to kill them all.
Knowing that part of their history, the Israelis of the late 1960s should have realized that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs could, and probably would, do the same thing, try to ride out the storm at anchor.
From The Atlantic:
Some Palestinians Want to Leave Gaza. Let Them.
No one should be trapped in a war zone.
by Joshua Krug | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST
Recently, I reached out to a prominent Palestinian activist to learn about his experiences in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He told me that his apartment had been destroyed, and that he lives in a tent with his family. They are under the near-constant threat of bombings, are often hungry, and are worried about starvation and sickness. He wants to leave the enclave—but right now, he can’t.
Several other Palestinians I’ve talked with also want to leave Gaza, and have also encountered closed borders. They of course want the violence to stop, and do not want to be permanently shut out. But above all, they want to be safe. (And I have withheld their names to protect their safety.)
An article in The Guardian this month featured a U.K.-based Palestinian who said his family members were killed in Israeli air strikes and echoed the above sentiments: “I’m not sure why no schemes have been introduced, nothing to evacuate people. I don’t even hear humanitarians talk about this any more.”
Alas! The Atlantic now requires readers to either subscribe or “start a free trial”. Fortunately, the article is also in my msn.com, and can be read for free here.
I am an American Jewish academic based in Germany, and I oppose the forced relocation of Palestinians from their land. Gaza is central to Palestinian history, and I would like people there to survive and thrive right where they are. Still, life—rather than land—should be the ultimate value, a simple fact often lost in the heated debates around the current conflict. I hear calls for a cease-fire and for the surrender of Hamas, but almost never for a safe path out of an active war zone. Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and the opportunity to take refuge outside a war zone rather than serve as martyrs for “the cause.”
There are never calls for “a safe path out of an active war zone” because none of the neighboring nations want the ‘Palestinians.’ Letting the ‘Palestinians’ leave concomitantly means having a place for them to go, and none of their neighbors want people they consider to be murderous trash living in their countries.
The Six-Day War is within living memory in the Arab states, but so is Black September. ‘Palestinian’ guerrilla fighters under Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization escaped east of the river into Jordan used the Hashemite Kingdom as a base to attack Israel, but their presence and politics were leading them into calling for the overthrow of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy and King Hussein. Finally, open warfare broke out between the PLO and Jordanian forces.
Jordan and the other Arab nations get it: admitting large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ means a very probable eventual attempt to overthrow their governments.
Egypt says a mass exodus from Gaza would bring Hamas or other Palestinian militants onto its soil. That might be destabilizing in Sinai, where Egypt’s military fought for years against Islamic militants and at one point accused Hamas of backing them.
Egypt has backed Israel’s blockade of Gaza since Hamas took over in the territory in 2007, tightly controlling the entry of materials and the passage of civilians back and forth. It also destroyed the network of tunnels under the border that Hamas and other Palestinians used to smuggle goods into Gaza.
With the Sinai insurgency largely put down, “Cairo does not want to have a new security problem on its hands in this problematic region,” (Riccardo Fabiani, Crisis Group International’s North Africa Project Director) said.
(Egyptian President Abdel Fattah) el-Sissi warned of an even more destabilizing scenario: the wrecking of Egypt and Israel’s 1979 peace deal. He said that with the presence of Palestinian militants, Sinai “would become a base for attacks on Israel. Israel would have the right to defend itself … and would strike Egyptian territory.”
“The peace which we have achieved would vanish from our hands,” he said, “all for the sake of the idea of eliminating the Palestinian cause.”
President el-Sissi regards Hamas as just another part of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group Egypt has long attempted to suppress.
The ‘Palestinians’ have created trouble wherever they’ve gone, and the other Arab nations really want no part of them; to put it bluntly, they see the ‘Palestinians’ as trash. And nobody wants to live next to a landfill.
